No, no, no – and just - NO…

This week I came across two blogs by mothers who have children. Each mother has written an entry on other options available to those who can’t have kids – such as adoption, fostering, IVF, babysitting, and even becoming a primary school teacher.

I’m sure they are well-intentioned, but, no. No. NO!!!

Having someone who has had kids tell us how it’s not all that bad because there are other ways to “have kids” in our lives is just not right and completely inappropriate – to my mind.

I’ve had close friends and family talk to me about other options available to me and Kirby, but they know me and often the conversation has been started by me. And even when my friends or family were the ones to start the conversation, they understand me well enough to know, most of the time, when to talk about certain things about not having children and when not to.

The problem I have about blog entries such as the above is that these women are writing about something so personal to many of us, so painful to many of us, and they don’t know us. They have not had the experience of facing the truth that biological children are not going to come along.

One of the entries even ended with the phrase that “being told you can’t have kids is not the end of the world”. Well…yes it is. It’s the end of the world in which we will look into the eyes of our children – it is the end of the world in which we will watch them grow up – it is the end of the world in which we will get to hold them.

I do believe these women were well-intentioned, but no – they do NOT get to tell us that we have choices, and options, and that it’s not the end of the world.

Strange jealousy...

This week I want to talk about something that I experienced in the early months of us realising we would not be able to have children.

It seems a strange thing to have thought now, but then, when we are grieving our thoughts are often different to those we would normally have.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we only have photos of our children as embryos. Wow – this is hard to write about…as I feel a bit ashamed about it (although I tell myself I shouldn’t.) I used to be jealous of people who had children, of course, but I also was kind of jealous of people who had had a still born child.

I didn’t, and don’t, actually wish a still born child on anyone and certainly not on ourselves. I can’t even begin to know what it would be like to have a child and for them to have died before they took their first breath.

What I was jealous for is that they got to hold their baby and have photos with them and show the baby to their family and perhaps friends too. Their baby, their child, was real. Ours were just a flicker for a few days and nobody but us and the medical staff saw them. Our parents couldn’t hold them – we couldn’t say “look at this beautiful angel that we created.”

Even now my arms are aching to hold them.

It’s a strange kind of jealousy – actually I’m not even sure, now, that jealousy is the right word. Perhaps it’s more that I wished for something more than what we had – even if it was just to get to hold our child. To have those photos and to see their faces. I wanted to take every part of them into my memory.

We didn’t get to do that and sometimes I think that our loss is not even viewed as a loss because of that. But, we did lose something precious.

It’s impossible to compare losses and it’s certainly not a competition. What am I trying to say here? Perhaps that there was nothing for us to hold out and say “see what we have lost – we created this and we had dreams and hopes for this and we loved this…and now it’s gone.”

Our pain about our loss was ours and the pain my friends have felt about their loss was theirs. There’s no scale to measure which was stronger or bigger or worse – but both losses and the grieving for our children were, and remain, real.

I feel that this entry is a bit all over the place, so let me know if any of it doesn’t make sense. xxx